Thursday, February 7, 2013

Are numbers real?

A Paradox Between Gun Ownership and Mathematics' Achilles heel

Sometimes people omit the necessity of algebra and express their vulgar, crude and ignorant ideas of quantities and measurements. Without the algebra, what is a number? Algebra gives meaning, after all 0.9999... =1. Herein lies the Achilles heel - the purpose of math's is to communicate. Communication is discontinuous, and therefore misconception threatens to be prevalent.

Philosophy time out! How was Achilles defeated?

Bad Answers:

He had a weak yet to be named back part of the ankle tendon

He got his yet to be named back part of the ankle tendon slit

and others

Ideal answer:

Achilles' inexperience with defeat made him incautious of felled enemies at his feet; the near slewn dude sliced Achilles on the lower compartment of his lower leg, arresting plantarflexion and he got killed by enveloping enemies.

I like to think of the success of numbers as coincidence ~ quantification does not, after all, preclude existence. Consider that there are21,346,000,147 round reinforced rubber tyres in existence at this exact moment; but because they are not co-located, the number is abstract due it's impracticality; it would be impossible to get these tyres into the same place at one time. Plausibly, the population of tyres in all existence is best described as sigma x(France),b(Germany)... etc . I know the differences between scalar and vector quantities, but numbers independent of time and space easily find their way into theories and leverage themselves into distorting results. We must have laws and standards that prevent their misuse, even by the layman! Like guns in the possession of a mad man on a primary school campus. Well, actually more comparable to the likelihood of "guns in the possession of a mad man".Funny enough, when you argue against a cited statistic, you often get accosted by more "statics"; as, when arguing about gun control with a gun owner, the discussion breaks down because at the back of the gun owners mind he knows that the end-game is the fact that he has a gun. But I am not saying he's going to shoot anyone, but he might think about it. If it was possible to deduce whether this thought is conscious or subconscious, it may give an indication as to how dangerous or volatile this individual may actually be. Who the hell gave this person the precedence that this behaviour is moral? If the pen felts your cold hands and words stroke your trigger, are you not socially inept? Not a crime, you say.